Badger of War

It might be smart to be already working up the next novel. Don't want to fall into a year-long slump wandering around wondering what idea is really, truly best.

The next novel might be smart to be either return to my Late Bronze Age historical, or to plan whatever it is Athena Fox will get up to next (Roman Britain. Shakespeare will be quoted and slings will be used. Other than that I really don't know).

Of course I'm not smart so I'm starting to think about what the preliminary research stack looks like for "Badgers" -- the file name for my Transhumanist Urban Fantasy Mil-SF Love Triangle.

With horror stuff. And that's the first question to ask. How does that connect? It has to be more than borrowed names and cliches, like the "glue some gears on it" disparaging description of some Steampunk.

Thing is, I think some of the tropes of horror -- even specific ideas within the horror landscape, like the walking dead -- have something to say about both the underlying questions of a Military SF story, and of a Transhumanist world. Many forms of horror have a relation to the Uncanny Valley where something is almost but not quite human. "If it tries to look like human but isn't you reach for your dagger" -- says the English-speaking, bipedal beaver holding his cuppa and tea scone. C.S. Lewis was never one for consistency.

Between the Undead and the cryogenically frozen is not that big a gap. No gap at all exists between a werwolf and the creatures of Doctor Moreau. Really, moving into the space of being "not entirely human" is almost literally what transhumanism means.

Yeah, about that. The only thing I can say for certain at this point is that if there's anything resembling a Singularity, the POV characters are still on this side of it.

Anyhow. I think the best place to start is probably Jason Covalito's books. Which I have at least two already in my library. He talks about the intersection between classic horror and modern pseudo-history, and I'm sure there is something there to get me started.

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Meanwhile I still have to practice trumpet at work. It is all about the open horn right now; cleaning up my slotting and working on my tone. Not even worth learning any new tunes, or getting back to sight-reading. Just twenty to thirty minutes a day of playing intervals. Sigh.